Gotse Delchev

Who was Gotse Delchev?

Georgi Nikolov Delchev was an important revolutionary figure in Ottoman-ruled Macedonia and Thrace at the turn of the 20th century. He was one of the leaders of what is known today as Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization, a paramilitary organization active in the Ottoman territories in Europe at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century.

Born in Kukush, then in the Ottoman Empire, in his youth he was inspired by the ideals of revolutionaries as Vasil Levski and Hristo Botev, who envisioned the creation of Bulgarian republic of ethnic and religious equality, as part of an imagined Balkan Federation. Delchev graduated secondary education in Thessaloniki's Bulgarian male high school and entered the military academy in Sofia, but he had been dismissed from there, because of his leftist political persuasions. Then he returned as Bulgarian teacher to Ottoman Macedonia, to became immediately an activist of the newly found revolutionary movement in 1894.